But in that absence, here's a YouTube link to Saturday's Cosplay Parade:
There are a few notable tweaks that came into play during Wrath of the Lich King, such as the automated dungeon finder or the 10/25 person raids. While TBC Classic added random compliments from an NPC if you became Exalted with their faction, Wrath saw an expansion of that by having more NPCs throw an "atta boy" your way when you pass them by.*
In a similar vein, there's the interaction with Gryan Stoutmantle out in Grizzly Hills that highlights what Blizzard could potentially do with a toon. If you've gone through the Defias quests in Vanilla Classic that lead up to and through The Deadmines, Gryan greets you as an old friend. If you haven't finished those quests, Gryan gives you a generic greeting. The decision tree on that sort of interaction isn't very difficult to implement --it's pretty much "if X is marked complete, then do Y else Z"-- but it provides a certain amount of familiarity to a player. The customization makes you feel a bit like you're part of a larger narrative in a small way.
But what happens when the game acknowledges you concerning events that you never performed, such as raids and whatnot? It's kind of hard to be the Champion of Azeroth if you never went raiding or even played 10+ years worth of expansions.
There is no easy way to let a player experience a story if they come into a game that's been running for ~20 years, or if they've been away from the game since Cataclysm or Mists. There's too much story, too many NPCs, and too many changes to the world** to easily digest. Therefore, I have to wonder if Blizzard hasn't simply thrown in the towel and is tailoring expansions to the 'in-crowd' who have already been playing consistently through the years and only stopped playing after Legion or during Battle for Azeroth.
This is inherently a self-limiting design, because a design team would want to draw in as many new players as possible. However, this becomes more feasible if the overall pool of lapsed players is large enough, but only to a certain extent. My complaints about WoW's story focus since about Wrath onward aside, once you are away from a story long enough it simply becomes impossible to catch up with what's going on.
I liken this to taking a break from watching a soap opera and then coming back to find yourself so out of touch with the story that you have no idea what's going on. And yes, I do have experience in that manner, having spent part of my sophomore year at UD watching Days of our Lives. Soap operas crank out new half hour episodes every day during the work week all year long, so you kind of have to keep watching to stay current. Taking even a week or two break from watching --and this was in the days before people had widespread access to online services, never mind the internet itself-- put me so far behind that I had major issues following the plot.
Or, to put it another way, if you stopped reading a book series at book #4 and you want to step back in at book #15, well... I hope you like reading, because that's going to be the easiest way to catch up in a comprehensible manner.
After a while, the publishers/producers just have to simply shrug their shoulders and just keep moving on, even at the cost of limiting their overall potential readership/viewership.
And that's what I think Blizz has done at this point with World of Warcraft. Sure, they'd like me to spend money on a Retail expansion, but they're moving ahead whether I do it or not. They get far more profit out of fewer subscriptions but a lot more cash shop activity than more subscriptions but far less out of the cash shop.
*The first few times it happens, it's cute. But after about the 20th time it starts to get really old. Especially if you're like me and want to blend in with the crowd, being called out in Dalaran by Linda Ann Kastinglow with "You couldn't ask for a finer person than Quintalan, I say."
**Dalaran? Whaddya mean there's more than one Dalaran? It's still back under a bubble north of Southshore like in TBC, right? And what's this about a spoiler? What?
#Blaugust2024
I've been glad that in the past expansion or so, you've been able to jump right into, say, Patch x.2 content with an alt who just dinged level cap *without* having to go through all the Patch x.0 and x.1 content again on that toon, but yeah, I kinda roll my eyes when my alt that I leveled through Dailies/World Quests and gathering and the occasional story quest gets greeted as if she has Done All The Things. If they can put in story skips, then could there be alternate greet text for characters who've used the skip that says something like "welcome, friend, we know your mentor and the great things they've done" instead of "welcome back Champion!"?
ReplyDeleteYou know, that's the thing: it's not difficult to do, coding-wise, but they've pretty much chosen not to do it. I suppose they could argue about code bloat, but I rather doubt it. The graphics and sound take up much more volume than quest text ever could.
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